Six-legged frog

Zach Conner has spent about a year hunting for frogs in a pond near his home, so he wasn’t surprised to pull a small, green one from the water earlier this month. But then a friend noticed that the frog had a couple of extra legs tucked up under its chin.

The frog got around fine, using its four regular legs, but the skinny fifth and sixth appendages “just sat there,” said Zach, 12.

“I thought it was unusual because I’ve been catching them for about a year,” he said. “That’s the only one I’ve ever found — or anything in the pond — that was weird like that.”

Usually a catch and release hunter, Zach decided to hold onto the six-legged frog and took it to Rudder Middle School with him the following day, where it impressed his sixth-grade science teacher, Eileen Jung.

“It could be a once-in-a-lifetime thing where you see something like that,” said Jung, who said she had seen a two-headed pig in college.

“I decided to use it as a lesson,” she said. “We had previously learned about observations and inferences, and when he brought in the frog it was the perfect opportunity to talk about that.”

The class studied the frog, measuring and examining the amphibian, who was by now named Gertrude.

Students discussed reasons why the frog might have developed the extra legs, including pollution in the pond or parasites that could have attacked Gertrude as a tadpole.